


And Day After Day Relief

by archea2



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Advent Calendar, Christmas, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Humor, Leonard-centered, M/M, Romance, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 18:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13129713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: Leonard buys an Advent Calendar.





	And Day After Day Relief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



> Dear Lilliburlero,  
> Your Leonard prompts caught my eye and heart! While I ended up browsing a number of them, and perhaps doing them less justice than if I’d elected one, writing from their cues was a pleasure. I hope reading the end-fic won’t be a chore!  
> Here’s wishing you all good things for the New Year.

_That night when joy began_

_Our narrowest veins to flush,_

_We waited for the flash_

_Of morning’s levelled gun._

_But morning let us pass,_

_And day by day relief_

_Outgrows his nervous laugh,_

_Grown credulous of peace…_

 

 

 

**1 December**

The calendar does _not_ have pride of place in old Mrs Keeble’s shop window: that honour goes to the saved-by-the-leaf naked Cherub holding a dusty pink lampshade. It lurks in a corner, shyly gaudy. Leonard brings the stray home.

‘It’s an oecumenic tribute,’ he tells Mrs formerly-M., ‘to the cross-cultural echoes between Christian and Jewish practices.’

Mrs C. eyes the hanging calendar doubtfully.

‘It’s a _wreath_.’

‘The lighting of candles,’ Leonard tries again, ‘points us to the _menorah_ , which – ‘

‘It’s a fing of beauty,’ Sidney mouthes around a bruised thumb. For one so deft in nailing down theological argutiae and shabby alibis, to say nothing of his young Thor looks, Sidney is a hammer hazard. ‘Why don’t you open number 1, Mrs C.?’

Mrs C., never one to diddle or simper, tackles the flap. It opens unto a little quote in red curlicues : _Once upon a time_ …

**2 December**

Once upon a time, Leonard Finch was known as Leo, Lenny, Our Len and Lick, owing to the persistency of his cowlick since B-day, when the midwife allegedly grabbed it ‘to nudge Our Len forward’. At five Leonard pinched his mother’s scissors, after the nickname had made it to his pre-school yard where it was embraced with equal parts of glee and vice. ‘Lick the Boy’ grew into a chant, a lisped rah-rah-rah, and while Leonard was too scared to fight the bullies, he found out that, preferably to the other cheek, he could turn his long legs into a perk and outrun them.

He doesn’t tell _this_ story, not until he and Sidney take the elder Chapmans and the younger Keatings for a Sunday walk through the Meadows. The frost is everywhere, a watermark brought out by the winter sun in every blade of pale green, and the water is frozen beautiful: it shows the same clear thickness as the sky overhead. Testing it with his own thick-soled boot, Leonard throws second thoughts to the winds and takes a little run, both arms eaglespread, and slides quickly, wildly and most unclerically along the shore.

The children clap – and Leonard marvels that fleeing has become _flying_ with barely a change of season.

 

**3 December**

 The postman has brought his little daughter with him, riding pillion on his bicycle, so Mrs C. offers her milk warmed on the stove with a teaspoon of freshly grated brown sugar. Leonard offers a first go at the calendar.

 They part friends for life after she has gravely handed over Myrrha Carpenter’s letter, heavy with news and a parade of sepia and faded blue stamps. Leonard’s day, too, is loaded: there’s the charity whist drive, which Mrs C. says she will touch only with a _hot_ poker, cards being the devil’s tool, and the carol rehearsal, with the not-carol rehearsal a close second, because the only way for Sidney Chambers to nurse a broken heart is to set up a Spirituals parish band, and… it’s past curfew when Leonard retires to his room and opens the letter.

 Myrrha Carpenter was not his best student at the Truro School for Girls, but she was the most intense. And a dedicated reader. Leonard remembers catching her repeatedly with a book on her lap, another on her desk, a third on her mind trying to catch up with her mouth as she fire-strafed Camus back at him. She was a terror, she was a natural. She smoked _gitanes_ behind the bicycle shed, not because she liked them, but to 'taste the harsh fibre of Existentialism, Mr Finch' (Leonard successfully switched her to bitter-dark chocolate). Myrrha ran the Book Club, the Debate Club and the Thespian School Society with unbounded energy – viz. her decision to stage Act I of _Caligula_ single-handedly, past the Head’s ban on moving the bedlinen down from the dorms. (The Head gave in when she caught Myrrha eyeing the dorm _curtains_.)

 The performance was one of a kind, if only because Myrrha had by then found two boosters. The offspring of displaced Berber immigrants, Aurélie Allal and her family had come to Marseilles, Paris, and lastly (in the nick of time) London. Aurélie was an angry young girl. Blond, long-haired, thin well beyond the lanky stage, she glowed with a desperation of rage that could have fooled Leonard for the glow of health if this hadn’t been 1943. Leonard, sensing and understanding the rage, whispered to Myrrha to cast Aurélie as Caligula. Frankie – the Hon. Frances Bassington – helped with enunciation. Frankie herself was a Sunday child, carefree and laughing, but she was also a stout, tough-ankled child who did not want to please her mother and be at least a willowy _gamine_ , dear. She wanted Camus’s sheer activity of consciousness and a motor scooter.

They are all faring well, Myrrha’s letter now tells him. She and Frankie are in Poland, where Myrrha studies experimental cabaret with a will and Taddeusz Cantor, while Frankie translates the plays they mean to bring back to London. They’re sending Mr Finch their opus to read and review the moment they spot a reliable typewriter. Right now, Frankie is on a jaunt to Lithuania: she wants to see a moose. What does Mr Finch think of the moose as a symbol for the courage to live? Oh, and Aurélie, who shares a flat with Myrrha, says hello : she is now chairperson for the South-East London Refugee Commitee (and gazette). ‘Talks the hind leg off a donkey these days – or MP, beg pudding,’ Myrrha writes cheerily, adding their joined wishes.

Leonard thinks of the golden star behind the calendar flap and offers a prayer for his wise women.

 

**4 December**

‘No,’ says Leonard, bringing the discussion to a grinding halt.

Daniel doesn’t sigh, because Daniel is currently making a sharp-honed point of not sighing, but he shakes his head.

‘It’s not as if the place advertises itself,’ he says. ‘It’s a cellar. A _London_ cellar. With its basement windows still painted black. All I’m asking you is to step down there with me early in the evening, have a Martini, shake Betty’s hand. He helped me find myself when I was a shy little Bohemian with a Leica half my size, and he’s still my best friend.’

‘I can’t risk – you keep telling me about these police raids, and now you want me to _drag_ me to one of these –’

‘You and drag,’ Daniel says drily, ‘are still worlds apart. Although you look incredibly fetchin’ in your Sunday gown. The neck drape alone… ’

‘Don’t mock my surplice.’ His words are too fast, and Daniel’s stiffening gaze records his shock, his hurt, his withdrawal, at maximum shutter speed.

‘I honour your life choices, Len. Your life values.’ And then he’s brushing past to the door, his back and shoulders a stony rebuttal of Leonard’s hand. ‘Not per your example.’

 

**5 December**

‘What _is_ it with you,’ says Mrs C. upon finding another shuttered flap. ‘All week long you’ve been like a child with a new coloured toy, couldn’t wait to see the new picture or the little verse, and now you won’t even touch the thing?’

‘Penance,’ Leonard says tightly.

‘What the dickens do _you_ have to atone for?’

Leonard, taking note of the emphasis, looks around. One china cup on the small table before the window-seat. One plate ditto, holding two glistening, perfectly cooked eggs on toast. One grilled tomato. Leonard moves his eyes to the one vacant seat.

‘Up with the lark and out gallivanting with Geordie, without a peep of notice.’ Mrs C. inhales the air mightily, lets her nostrils speak her displeasure. ‘In Comberton, too. I don’t know what the local clergy’s coming to if they have to borrow _our_ vicar.’

 

**6 December**

Sidney’s still incommunicado. Leaving Leonard with the two choirs, the mummers, the Nativity, the Mothers’ Guild (a praetorian guard to this year’s Nativity), the speakers for and against plastic snowdrops in the Christmas floral arrangement, plus any parishioner felled by the ghost of Christmas Present and in need of insta-spiritual guidance.

 

**7 December**

Sidney is officially AWOL. Which is a terrible, terrible inconvenience because Leonard still can’t make up his mind if plastic is an abomination (Mrs C.) or the best thing these darn Yanks came up with after the shoulder-fired bazooka and the daiquiri (Jack). In the end, he reroutes the snowdrops to the wassail-bough, the mummers’ traditional garland of evergreens. Plastic is indestructible, he tells them. We need to find symbols and parallels in our time, don’t we? Yes, we do. Just, um, don’t put them anywhere close to a lighted candle.

 

**8 December**

Daniel shows up at Mass, but slips out at ‘Thanks be to God’ _sharp_.

 

**9 December**

Sidney is back, with the manic eye of the sleepily challenged and a mood to match. He paces their breakfast nook, issuing a continuous flow of ? and ! in his effort to untwine a case that apparently started with the Comberton sexton finding a butternut squash in lieu and place of his Jesus doll, and has now grown into a full-fledged poltergeist scare, with no recorded precedent in Geordie’s archive of local locked-room myster –

‘Can’t you at least cover the services?’ Leonard blurts out. There is a time for going with the flow, and there is a time for slamming the faucet off, and no time like now. The not-carol choir is wearing Leonard thin. A man of faith and works, he will attend to both; will do his daily chores, really and truly; will comfort the sick, preach the Word, and, at a pinch, assist the human birthing process. Be a Marian Anderson coach, though? Way beyond the line of calling.

‘For three days?’ Sidney asks, all breeze and clipped county speech. ‘Surely, you can hold the fort that long – we’re not even mid-December yet! Ask Jack to – ’

‘It’s n-not a fort!’ Leonard yells, and there it is, the warped ring of envy palpable in each of their voices. Leonard knows that Sidney, deep down, resents his happiness. December comes laden to the hilt with memories: bright, bitter shards of might have been. And Sidney must feel Leonard’s pang at Sidney’s privilege to wear his grief on his sleeve. His ill-fated affair with Amanda has been a matter of intense parish gossip, but one that comes with a Cornelian aura of romance. If Leonard was to lose Daniel (was – or has?), who would say ‘pity’ and ‘such a handsome pair’? In whose arms would he receive license to weep?

‘It’s an open-door policy, which I’m all for, but I’m a churchman, not a superman! I’m not! And you _always_ up and leave, Sidney, while I go out on a limb… on a… ‘

He glances up into Sidney’s handsome, stricken face – yet another echo – and, too late, finds Sidney’s eyes lowered to the grip of his hand, his wrist half turned out, its stigmata faintly visible.

‘…I’m sorry,’ Sidney says at last. It’s not enough, but Leonard nods and shuffles his limb out of sight, pulling awkwardly at his cuff.

‘I didn’t mean for you to be,’ he mutters.

A knock at the door. A chore on its way. They both turn, knowing the talk is not over and it is too soon for duty to be a relief. But the day must be seen to. Peace, perhaps, will come with evensong.

 

**10 December**

A shifty-eyed Geordie decoys him back from the library and into their local. While this is not Leonard’s first foray into a public house, he feels a bit hot under the dog-collar at the idea of drinking _coram populo_ , let alone at tea time. But Geordie tells the young lady manning the counter ‘Orange squash, luv’, then sighs. Squashes: still a hot topic with Geordie.

‘I really shouldn’t – ‘

‘That’s me bein’ sorry,’ Geordie cuts in. He stares into his shorter, amber-filled glass; sighs again. ‘Look, I know I make it seem like I have a monopoly on him, which I don’t –‘

‘You’re his friend,’ Leonard says simply. ‘Friendship comes with – a necessary claim on each other’s time and attention. I would hate to deny him that.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not fair if the job – _my_ job – takes its toll on yours.’ Geordie sips at the amber. ‘It’s that time of the year again, Leonard.’

‘Criminals not taking to the holiday spirit?’ Leonard asks, half perched on his bar stool and doing his honest best to sound like a connoisseur. Geordie chuckles.

‘Time to make new resolutions, I meant. Family-wise, and – look, I’m not saying it’s all on me. You’re in Sidneyland more often than I am, and you know him as well as I do. Love him to the bone, too – that is – I don’t mean –’ and, God help them all, Inspector Keating is churning up a blush. Wise Leonard lets the trail peter out.

‘What I mean is, he’s a bit of a bolter. And he’ll bolt right to where I do, because that’s where the… the sick and wicked of it gets small-scale, if you get my drift, and we can face up to it this time round. But I don’t want him to turn his back to the bigger picture, not I – even if I personally don’t – that is – oh, blast it. Just, I promise I’ll –‘

‘Get him to the church in time,’ Leonard says.

There is a pause, stretched long enough for a slow, relieved grin to bloom.

‘Get him to the church,’ Geordie sings happily, and, when Leonard adds a cautious ‘oh, oh’, bangs his glass onto the counter and goes full chorus, ‘for Gaaawd’s sake, get him to the church on time!’

 

**11 and 12 December**

‘You’ll miss the bells,’ Daniel says, stroking his hair.

Leonard kisses him drowsily. Their four-month lovemaking is still a novice, in his image. All hands on decks with some help from their mouths, haphazard and fumbling on his side, methodical and restrained on Daniel’s. But tender, but true. Baby steps (‘ _Amoeba_ steps,’ Daniel laughs), because Leonard still feels uneasy about the animal spirits, all those lions and tigers Daniel says he can feel roaring faraway in Leonard’s blood, under the layers of sublimation heaped along the years. Leonard is not so sure. But what they do, he loves, even if it is mostly surface pleasure, skin on skin, and orgasm still feels like a thawing rather than an erupting.

‘It’s all right,’ he mumbles, laying his sleeping head, human, on Daniel’s faithful arm. ‘Sidney’s seeing to the pies.’

‘Hmmmm?’

‘Pork-pies. Mrs Lambert wants us to bless hers. Says it’s not right for Lambert to kill the pig a fortnight from Christmas even if it’s tradition, so she needs the Vicar to absolve her of blood-shedding before she starts on the baking.’ Leonard yawns. ‘Sidney said…’

He lets the sentence hang in the drowsy air, thinking back to the small note he found pinned to the calendar the previous evening, Sidney’s slanted writing. ‘ _Lord, teach us to take our own hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be_.’ Leonard had turned it over, suspecting Dorothy L. Sayers rather than the BCP. ‘ _Have a lie-in tomorrow_.’

It took Leonard five minutes to make up his mind and grab his coat. It took less than one for Daniel to meet him half-way on his doorstep and pull him against his mouth, his tall form softly enshadowed by the night.

‘Sidney said…?’

‘I’ll go to London with you,’ Leonard tells Daniel’s naked, human, half-waking arm, and closes his eyes again.

 

**13 December**

The pie is delectable. So say all of them, including Geordie, who drops by to proclaim a complete and utter lack of developments in the case and takes a slice home for Cathy.

**14 December**

He mails his card to Hilary Franklin. It slips down the red box, its fall hushed by all the white and creamy envelopes weighing in for peace and good will. His won’t be answered, Leonard thinks, not yet: not every penance ends in hugs. Wishes make poor substitute vows. And forgiveness is the wind in the Scriptures, blowing wherever – whenever – it will. Perhaps, if she can’t forgive him, she can be another Aurélie: chasing survival in anger and finding growth. Or perhaps he is all too forgettable, and it was a mistake to write himself back into her thoughts. What to do? There is no answer, only the solid red box visible under the first dust of snow; only his hope that Hilary’s heart may be strong and open again.

 

**15 December**

The Comberton Poltergeist strikes again. It wakes Leonard up at 3 a.m. by proxy of the  downstairs phone, shrilling for Sidney. This time, it’s the sexton’s lady who’s had a tree ornament thrown at her nose. Neither broke, but Mr Pump is understandably baffled and asking if Sidney would consider doubling as an exorcist.

 

**16 December**

‘Oh please, I’m not _that_ High Church,’ is Sidney’s (predictable) answer.

 

**17 December**

The calendar reminds them all that in those days Caesar Augustus went on a paperwork craze and ordered a census of the entire Roman world. ‘ _Plus ça change_ ,’ Leonard sighs inwardly, tackling the first typewritten form. Why the Cambridge tour tycoons always wait until the week before Christmas to apply for a church visiting permit… a church reading of C. S. Lewis… a horse-riding pageant… a Scrooge McDuck Christmas Carrol… a…

 

**18 December**

Daniel’s dark room is Leonard’s beacon. Where he can kiss at will and give his roving hands more license under the red safelight, their lust coalescing slowly, safely, picture-like.

‘Would you let me…’ Daniel starts, and grazes Leonard’s mouth on the way to biting his own lips. Stops. Presses their smiles together, waiting, faltering through the catch in his voice. ‘Not your face, I promise. Just – this, you, the beauty of you in the act. For my eyes only, Len.’

‘I…’ That Daniel finds him beautiful, when Leonard’s mirror has assured him day in day out that his body was (at best) of the prim and stilted persuasion, is still a new thing.

‘In the inner darkness,’ Daniel intones at his ear, ‘his great body glowed red with power, and…’

‘Introducing you to D. H. Lawrence was a bad, _bad_ idea,’ Leonard moans, and nearly knocks over the tank as his climax casts the entire room in a gold-red light.

**19 December**

‘I’ll take _any_ clue by now.’ (Geordie, clawing at the flap. He and Sidney are just back from the pub.) ‘Let the angel ragamuffins speak!’

‘That’s – not a bad take on Bibliomancy, actually.’

‘Well, don’t rip the whole thing off, for Pete’s sake.’ Behind Sidney’s tall form, Mrs C. is craning her neck. ‘You’re supposed to pop them open.’

Geordie slips a practised thumb behind the card and pops. Clears his throat. ‘ _You will,_ ’ he informs the room in general, ‘ _conceive and give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus_.’

A pause.

‘A babe!’ Sidney cries out. ‘Of course – Geordie, it’s a babe!’

‘Uh? Sidney, there isn’t one pretty girl in this –’

‘No, no, no, _no_! An illegitimate child! Haunting the – of course – she hid him in the – which means the squash is really a pumpkin, don’t you see? A little Pump! Quick, Geordie, quick - there _has_ to be a secret passage between the sexton’s house and the church!’

 

**21 December**

A secret passage there was, between church and house. Leonard raises his Bovril to the ragamuffins in due acknowledgement.

 

**22 December**

It may be that he has babes on the mind, or it may be that The Five O’Clock actually opens at six. Leonard tells Daniel he’ll meet him there and then, honour bright, and to pull up at the first phone booth.

...Amanda’s eyes glisten a tad browner. As do his. Ah, but the Helm wind is general in England: coldly pure, a forerunner to the snow. They have coffee and sugar, and he tells her about the _riproaring_ (Cathy) success of the not-carol choir, more relaxed than he has any call to be with a woman he once saw naked from the waist down and writhing on his bed, while he clung to her shoulders for dear life. Birth does that to you, it seems – weaves an invisible cord of gut-deep understanding. That can be tugged ever so gently, for instance when Amanda leans sideways to pick up her purse, still looking at him, and asks, ‘Will you give him this from me?’

 

**23 December**

‘We may. Trust that some man-made chemicals will change the unique sum created by Our Lord in each individual, and stamp it with our seal of approval.’ Leonard makes himself look into the still black face. ‘Or we may trust Saint Paul. _Ama et fac quod vis_.*’

‘The riskier bet.’

‘Unless rooted in faith.’

‘Faith that He can make a twisted path right?’

‘Faith that He will tread it with us if it’s a path of love.’

‘This is glib talk, Mr Finch.’

Leonard is shaking, harder than he has ever shaken in a man-made quarrel. But the memory of Betty’s laughter is with him, kind as a blessing, regal as the swathes of purple silk wrapped around him. The Five O’Clock was filled with colours that night, down to Leonard’s black-on-black sweater and jacket. They were part of it. He is one of them. He can, he will speak up for them.

‘Would you,’ he says rashly, ‘take drugs to become an albino, if you were told they were the right path?’

The Archdeacon’s face flares up, his mouth and eyes so vibrant that Leonard has to shut his eyes. Stupid, _stupid_. Caught with your two feet in somebody’s yard, his father used to say. Who is he to – how dare he? (But how can he not?) When sight finds him again, the Archdeacon is standing up, one hand lifted – palm open, Leonard’s brain tells him. A ban. Or a benediction. He rises to his feet.

‘Your Queen Bess,’ his superior says, ‘once said that she had no desire to open a window in the souls of men. I will not open one in your bedchamber, Mr Finch.’

Chastised. And pacified. Leonard takes in a long-expected breath, staggering under the puff of adrenaline.

‘And I thank you for it, Archdeacon.’

(* _Love, and do what you will_.)

 

**24 December**

There is paper everywhere, gold and silver. Angel hair round Dickens’s neck. Putting Geordie in charge of the eggnog was a rash move, but nobody seems (yet) the worse for it. In fact, Geordie and Cathy have coaxed Jack and Mrs C. to update the Lobster Quadrille with them, or what Leonard can only consider some approximate version, to the accompaniment of both Dickens and the Platters.

‘Sidney, you sly dog! Who died and made you king of the gramophone?’

In the medley of barking, laughing, and Esme’s fluted accompaniment _to_ the Platters, Leonard manages to reach Sidney’s ear and whisper, ‘Amanda gave me this for you.’

When Sidney turns, Leonard puts his lips to his friend’s cheek. The kiss hides no tigers. Nor does it plead for any on her behalf. Sidney covers it briefly with one hand; reaches for Leonard’s wrist with the other. There is a time for secrecy, and there is a time for sharing a window between soul and soul.

‘I wish…’

But the knock has Mrs C. walk briskly out of the eight-legged jig and up to the door. ‘Oh, here you are!’ they hear her say next. ‘Come in, Mr Marlowe. Are these your roses? Such _lovely_ colours.’

‘Twice-blooming hellebores.’ Daniel meets his eyes over Mrs C.’s still faultless bob; winks quickly. ‘All yours now. It was very kind of you to –’

‘Tosh! If this one’ – Mrs C. nods a resolute chin at Sidney – ‘can ask his best friend over, then what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Come inside, do. And tell these heathens, enough with the jingles already.’

 

**25 December**

The last picture is always already known. There will be the Family, Leonard thinks sleepily, grown so familiar to us that we forget how unconventional it is, really. Angels and animals and a single-not-single mother hobnobbing in the earthy, loamy warmth of a barn. And the picture will make it look so simple. So acceptable. Here, perhaps, is the hope…

‘All set to go,’ Daniel smiles, back from tucking Mrs C. gallantly into her coat. Jack is already starting their car. Sidney, for reasons best known to the eggnog, is asleep on the couch. ‘Walk me to the door?’

‘In a moment,’ Leonard says. ‘Walk me to the wall? There’s just one little thing we need to do first.’

 

 

 

_As mile by mile is seen_

_No trespasser’s reproach_

_And love’s best glasses reach_

_No fields but are his own._

W. H. Auden, _« Five Songs »_


End file.
